My second best example of the logic I’ve been describing around my arrow model and organisational capabilities is HCL Technology. This comes from former CEO Vineet Nayar’s book, Employees First Customers Second (the picture is a Vineet original he drew for me when we met up.)

HCLT are an Indian IT services firm that have gone through interesting changes in recent years. The stimulus for this transformation was Vineet reading Blue Ocean Strategy (I referred to this as a recent update on Competitive Positioning.)

Vineet was fairly well persuaded by the book but didn’t think it would be possibly to create clear blue water in HCLT’s competitive positioning - what the company does - as IT services is a commodity industry. So instead he decided to create blue ocean strategy in how the company works, ie in its organisation.

He doesn’t use the words but HCPT clearly created differentiated organisational capability - an organisation design which really meant employees were being put first in order to deliver for their customers.

This again has led to some interesting changes but once again, they are only really best fit results of identifying which activities would support the required capability.

This includes ann upside down organisational pyramid with employees being at the top - and it’s not just spin. Managers really do spend a large proportion of their time enabling employees rather than in command and control mode telling them what to do. (This was enabled though an open 360 degree feedback system where if you provided feedback on a manager you got to see their average scores. This transparency generated huge changes in managers’ behaviours.)

HR is also an enabling function rather than a controlling one. (This was brought about through a service ticket approach in which employees can raise tickets about HR processes which constrain rather than enable them, and are also responsible for closing tickets when they decided the problems have been resolved. HR was measured on reducing the time it took to close service tickets and also driving towards zero open tickets. Wow!)

Of course, there is still a command and control structure as well - Vineet needed to be able to tell people just to go and do something (nicely I’m sure) - which is why you can see both pyramids on the picture.

By the way, Vineet’s second big insight was that big change could be brought around by smart small interventions not just by big transformation programmes - ie not by wielding Neptune’s trident but simply by letting small droplets fall into the ocean, coalescing and forming ripples joint together into larger and larger waves - eventually bringing about transformational change.